supporting scholarly exchange about communication across the curriculum
Content Area:
Communication Across the Curriculum
Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum
Writing to Learn vs. Writing in the Disciplines
Discipline:
Welcome to the WAC Clearinghouse Theses and Dissertations Page. The theses are displayed below. If you'd like us to add a new thesis or dissertation to our list, please contact Kevin Eric De Pew.
The purpose of this study was to replicate and expand on a previous study by Zimmerman and Bandura (1994). The present study examined the relationships among self-efficacy for writing, self-efficacy for academic achievement, self-evaluative standards, verbal aptitude scores, grade goals, final course grades, and gender among university students in first-semester English composition classes. The study sought to determine whether gender or writing self-efficacy significantly predicts course grades, and whether one predicts more strongly than the other.
The subjects were students in first-semester freshman composition at The University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The instrument used to measure self-efficacy and self-regulatory factors was the Student Writing Survey, adapted from a survey developed by Zimmerman and Bandura (1994). Students' SAT and ACT scores and final grades were obtained from the university records office.
The primary parts of the survey were found to be highly reliable. The Self-Efficacy for Writing scale identified three distinct factors: Self-efficacy for writing, verbal ability, and self-management. {Paragraph Break} Writing self-efficacy was found to be influenced by verbal aptitude and, in turn, to influence efficacy beliefs about final grades, as well as final grades students would consider satisfactory.
The higher students' self-efficacy beliefs for writing, the higher the grades they expected to attain and the higher the grades required to provide a sense of satisfaction. Both self-efficacy for academic achievement and self-evaluative standards influenced grade goals, which, in turn, influenced final grades. Self-evaluative standards, also directly influenced final grades. Although students' writing self-efficacy was not found to influence final grades directly, it influenced final grades indirectly through its impact on other factors.
Gender was not significantly related to most of the principal factors in the study; however, it was significantly related to final course grades. Writing self-efficacy and gender were both found to predict writing achievement significantly, with self-efficacy being the slightly stronger predictor. Students who expressed higher writing efficacy beliefs tended to make higher final grades. Female students tended to make higher final grades than male students.
This pilot study examined the effects of journal writing on academic achievement for second-grade students in a Detroit Public School.
Two academically similar classes were chosen for this study. The control group was taught science with a traditional hands-on method, while the experimental group included interactive journal writing in their science program. A test was given to each group at the end of the unit and the means were calculated. The journals were also evaluated and the product-moment coefficient of correlation was calculated to see if there was a correlation between journal quality and test scores.
The difference in test scores between the total groups was not statistically significant. However, females in the experimental group scored significantly higher than males in the same group and females in the control group. The correlation between journal quality and test scores was determined to be positive and statistically significant.
The current study examined women engineering co-op students learning about engineering discourse practices in the workplace. The study included a survey of recent engineering graduates (92 men, 84 women) of Midtown University (a pseudonym), and case studies of five women Midtown engineering students enrolled in co-op during spring and summer 1997. Survey results aided in designing the case studies, which examined more closely the experiences of women co-op students in a variety of workplace environments, and who were majoring in engineering fields that have been identified as particularly attractive to women: civil, chemical, and industrial engineering. The case studies relied heavily on interviews, site visits, and writing samples. Although the survey provided useful information about the amount of time respondents believed they spent writing during co-op, the kinds of documents they wrote, and aids for learning to write, the case studies revealed the complexity of the learning process, involving the quality of the mentoring relationship between and student, the availability of sample documents to model, the presence of supportive co-workers, students' prior writing experience and disciplinary knowledge gained in school, the kinds of tasks students' are assigned during co-op, and students' engineering specialty and gender. Perhaps the most important finding was that the women studied here all believed that engineers use writing to persuade, which seems to contradict previous research suggesting that engineers do not view their writing as persuasive, but as simply presenting facts that speak for themselves. It is unclear whether or to what extent gender may have influenced the women's perceptions about engineers' use of persuasion; it is perhaps more likely that they were attracted to engineering fields and co-oped in workplaces in which persuasion was integral to the work of engineers. Future research needs to compare the perceptions of men and women engineers Across engineering specialties and workplace contexts. The study findings have implications for researchers and teachers of business and technical communication, writing in non-academic settings, experiential learning, gender studies, writing Across the curriculum, and writing in the disciplines.
This dissertation examined the effects on learner attitude and achievement of using a cognitive apprenticeship Approach to teach college-level algebra. College Algebra was chosen because similar studies such as Treisman's Workshop model have focused on Calculus rather than students who are considered by many institutions 'remedial' learners. The cognitive apprenticeship Approach included emphasis on a language-intensive classroom in which learners were encouraged to think, talk, write, and reflect on their learning of mathematical concepts. It incorporated inquiry teaching (focusing on interactive questioning of learners) and the use of writing Across the curriculum strategies. The study reviewed the literature with regard to the effect of the 'traditional' Approach to mathematics instruction, especially on minorities and women, and identified alternative approaches including the one selected. Results of the study indicated no significant differences in either attitude or achievement; however, some aspects of the data suggested that the experimental group may have started at a lower point but were comparable in achievement by the end of the study. The study also examined the results of interviews with participants as an assessment of learner attitudes. Included are common themes of the interviews as they related to the components of Collin's cognitive apprenticeship model. Finally, the study included, as a special case, students enrolled in a pre-college level algebra course and offered some observations about the benefits of the method for this group.
The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of journal writing on students in entry level college algebra. Current trends encourage writing Across the curriculum, and research indicates that writing in the mathematics classroom can benefit the participants by giving them the opportunity to articulate their ideas, improve analytical and problem solving skills, and improve their attitude toward mathematics. This study included twenty-one entry level college algebra students writing weekly in an out-of-class assignment. Analyses looked at the effects of writing on attitude and performance scores gathered before and after the treatment period. Gender, first language, and classroom format were considered in the analyses. The results of this study indicated that while writing did not significantly affect participant attitude, performance was improved by the addition of the writing assignment. No difference was found for groups based on gender, first language, or classroom format.
This study recursively constructed a view of Cognitive Apprenticeship--an educational Approach introduced in 1989 by Collins, Brown, and Newman--and a research-based view of the collegiate writing motivations endemic to first-year, second-year, and fourth-year college students. The view of Cognitive Apprenticeship ultimately constructed was influenced by a two-year case study of Business Administration students' writing motivations foundational to project, but so, too, were that case study and its findings strongly influenced by the represented features of Cognitive Apprenticeship. The overall purpose of this project was to define a body of Theory informative to a more consistent, more learning-focused Approach to writing throughout the college curriculum. The body of Theory suggested in the text was based on current Theories of cognition, learning, and motivation, expanding and particularizing Collins, Brown, and Newman's concept of Cognitive Apprenticeship. The project was based upon five major goals: (1) to provide a view of Cognitive Apprenticeship and its concomitant Theories comprehensive enough to prove its worthiness as a pedagogical Theory and comprehensible enough to be applied by all collegiate instructors who teach with writing, (2) to gain evidence of curricular motivations' interactions with cognition and learning, (3) to establish congruity between Cognitive Apprenticeship's features and characteristics of intentional, higher order learning, (4) to identify and model evolving collegiate writing attitudes and motivations, and (5) to determine the influences on subsequent writing motivations of students' causal attributions regarding college writing outcomes. The study concluded that Cognitive Apprenticeship is highly congruent with the reported motivations of collegiate writers. Furthermore, all groups in the study were determined to have relatively high motivations toward intentional, higher order learning, with first- year students determined to be the group most strongly motivated by the intrinsic characteristics of a college writing task or writing situation. Though not an original study focus, potentially crucial gender-based differences in writing-focused attitudes and motivations were also noted. Suggestions for first-year college writing, implications for writing programs and writing Across the college curriculum, and suggestions for further, similarly focused empirical studies were also included.
Composition scholars have argued that the process of becoming a better writer in the Academy is actually a process of acculturation, of joining an 'academic discourse community.' This work sets out to determine how such a thing might happen at the level of student and teacher. At the core are two ethnographic case studies of student-teacher relationships. They are contextualized within both a specific institutional setting (the University of Michigan's English Composition Board) and a wider setting (Writing Across the Curriculum programs; the Academy and its relation to women). Conventional expectations of development are fulfilled in the female teacher-male student relationship, where masculine values (e.g., use of irony and 'repartee' in conversation) dominate. Nurturing, a value associated with females, is repudiated, first by the student, then the teacher. This relationship seems 'successful' to the pair: the student performs splendidly on an ECB 'argument/exam.' In contrast, the female teacher-female student relationship is confusing: smoothly social on the surface, it is nonetheless marked by disruptions as both women attempt to find their places relative to (masculine) academic authority--the public world--and feminine experience. This case study is composed with the aid of feminist Theorist Anne Herrmann's 'female dialogic,' a union of Irigaray's Theory of the female subject and Bakhtin's Theory of the (male) political subject in discursive relation to others. Through the female dialogic I engage in internal dialogue (regarding the paradox of the 'academic/woman') and in dialogue with my female student and other women. This work brings together social Theory and speculative Theory as used by phenomenologists, feminists, and composition scholars to make possible a way to investigate the empirical world and its social norms yet retain the capacity to imagine change. Within composition studies, it also brings together expressivism and the teaching of 'academic discourse' by arguing for increased formal and topical experimentation by academic and student writers which could be furthered by progressive Writing Across the Curriculum programs. This, together with an on-going critique of masculinity, seems essential for women students especially.
Since journals were introduced into the composition curriculum in the 1960's, they have become increasingly important components both of writing and writing Across the curriculum courses. Yet the available literature shows we know little about the historical and social contexts of journal and diary keeping. This dissertation looks at the ways gender informs our students' attitudes toward and experience with journal keeping in both academic and nonacademic settings. Using three men's and three women's journals as the focal point of my discussion, I find striking sex differences both in the quantity and in the 'qualities' of the journals they wrote. These patterned differences, I claim, are linked with centuries- old gendered traditions of journal and diary keeping, and are consonant with other larger gendered patterns in discourse, which in large part, are a consequence of the dominant/muted and public/private relationships men and women have held with regard to language. Implications for teaching and further research are discussed.
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